We had a little drama in St Paul this morning: an anti-choice kook decided that an effective way to silence a family planning clinic was to smash the entrance to Planned Parenthood with his SUV.

Several employees were in the building at the time, said Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kathi Di Nicola. She said the SUV hit the front door of the clinic two or three times, damaging the clinic’s front door and surrounding stonework.

When Di Nicola arrived at the clinic, she said the man had gotten out of the SUV and was pacing around it, holding a crucifix and chanting. “He was agitated and he was saying, ‘shut down this Auschwitz,’ ” she said.

Violent, unthinking, incoherent, and flaunting his piety. Typical.

In contrast, the staff at the clinic responded calmly and with discipline.

This is a promo for a wingnut movie that portrays the autonomy of women as a great evil … with an all-female cast. Even this short clip is nauseating.

The lies fly thick and fast. I’m particularly disgusted with the one interviewee who claims that, as a former representative of family planning education, she would go into schools and increase the teen pregnancy rate so that the girls would have 3-5 abortions between the ages of 13 and 18, and that this was the goal of her agency. Right. It is, of course, the antithesis of what family planning organizations actually do.

The rest is also vile, starting with the odious Phyllis Schlafly. And the foundation of their outrageous claims? The rantings of the 16th century proto-Puritan preacher, John Knox. Hasn’t the passage of 500 years been enough to expose him as ridiculous?

Many of you were anxious to find out more about my trip to Columbus, Ohio in a few weeks, and here’s the information you need. This is to be a Darwin Day banquet, open to the public, but there is a charge. It’s on 14 February, so you could always bring a date and say it’s their Valentine’s Day gift, too.

It’s a good day to take a moment to read Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It tells of an oppression I can’t even begin to imagine, and of frustration with complacency and a dream that was always being deferred.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

He finds no virtue in the moderate position that preserved the status quo.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

And at the same time, he rejected violence and the true extremist.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Obviously, he saw the church as a force for good. Well, at least some churches: he sees that the churches that were not part of the civil rights movement were part of the problem.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

King found some strength in his church, and I have to respect that. However, he was also blind to the implications of what he was seeing: that perhaps faith was not a source of wisdom and social justice, but seems to be orthogonal to it. His power did not come from his religion, but from the righteousness of his cause, and it’s unfortunate that he did not see that.

I think also he might be horrified at what has happened to our country, which has diminished the boundaries between the sacred and secular … which has not made us a better place.

Go read it all. It will make you think.

Sunday morning at 9am Central, tune in to Atheist Talk radio — this week, Dan Barker is going to tell us something or other.

Fans of classic SF will be grieved to learn that both Patrick McGoohan, AKA The Prisoner, and Ricardo Montalban, AKA Khan Noonien Singh, will now only be accessible on DVD in the movie room of your local SF convention and on late night television.

We want information. Did Montalban quote Moby Dick on his deathbed?

The intelligent design creationists are jubilant — a paper has been published that shows that organisms were front-loaded with genes for future function! It describes “‘latent’ or ‘preexistent’ evolutionary potential” in our history, they say.

One small problem. The paper says nothing of the kind. It does mention latent potential, but it means something entirely different from something that is ‘front-loaded’, which is a sneaky little elision on the part of the creationists. There isn’t even the faintest whiff of a teleological proposal in the paper at all, which makes me wonder if they even read it, or if, as seems more likely, they’re simply incapable of comprehending the scientific literature.

So let’s take a look at what the paper is actually about, and you’ll see that it in no way supports the self-serving cheering of the creationists.

[Read more…]

Perhaps you’ll appreciate this little ditty for Roy Zimmerman and family.

That guy Ben Goldacre just blew my mind. What is the most popular cosmetic surgery in Asia? Blepharoplasty. Many people want to have the Western “double eyelid”, while I didn’t even know I had a double eyelid until I saw a few comparison pictures! In addition to plastic surgery, people buy cheap plastic gadgets to create a wrinkle, or use ugly do-it-yourself methods with acid and double eyelid tape (yes, there is such a product).

I am rather weirded out. A wrinkle I never even noticed before, or at least took for granted, is apparently a mark of beauty to some people who lack one. That’s just screwed up. Or, more interestingly, it’s an indication of how much attention people pay to the details of eyes.

(via The Telegraph)